TOK Knowledge Question: To what extent is my sense perception a reliable way of knowing?

One answer to the question ‘How do I know?’ (personal knowledge) or ‘How do we know?’ (shared knowledge) is that I can either, think it through (reason), feel it (emotion), recall it (memory), see it or hear it (sense perception). The 8 ways of knowing in TOK offer different answers this question.

If you want to evaluate the reliability of our sense perception there are various examples to draw on: optical illusions, the colour changing card trick, or this example, by Simons and Chabris…..just count the number of times that the players in the white T-shirts pass the ball….